


Music & Musings

by wernythepoohx



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen, but hopefully it's clear, hopefully it doesn't hurt your brain like it hurt mine, i think i went too ham with the imagery but, idk where I was going with this, like even who the characters are, music jargon from a music nerd, so much is implied, spoiler alert check the character tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 04:22:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18613048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wernythepoohx/pseuds/wernythepoohx
Summary: The root of music is immutable. The message, the melody, the motifs; all have always been in music. It keeps flowing. It keeps communicating. That is simply its purpose.And so, he played.





	Music & Musings

**Author's Note:**

> oof

The notes begged for a climax, but he was unwilling to provide the satisfaction.

He dragged the notes out, lingering on the eighth note of the phrase, the seventh note of the scale.

Meter, he thought, was trivial. It confined, restricted and enforced music to a set pace. But music was not meant to be static, it was not meant to conform. It was meant to move, to travel: it was meant to  _ breathe _ . Music was created for the sole purpose of expressing oneself.

This was why he tried to not look at music scores. People relied on them as their lifelines. Without reading between the lines, without feeling the subtle undertones and meanings, they simply followed: adhering to the bar lines and the set tempo, executing dynamics and articulation without thought. He hated how people never asked the one question that should always be asked in the face of music:  _ Why? _

Why did the composer write the melody this way? What made them decide to include dissonance, a plagal cadence, or a minor modulation? Every piece, every phrase, every note had a purpose and reason for being there. Regardless of whether they were clashing chords or monophonic lines, everything happened for a reason. For emotion.

So he sat at the grand piano, a solitary figure, head bent as he took in the eighty-eight blocks of wood that were responsible for making music. The ivory keys had taken on a yellow hue; neglect. It had simply been too long, too long since he last played anything. In his defence, it had been a while since he last stepped foot in the Manor.

He played.

He was a snake. He was slippery, sly and cunning. And although, yes, those qualities were commonly associated with the reptile, there were many attributes that he was unaware of before quickly assuming the characterisation.

One of these - and the most alarming thing for him to find out - was the shedding of skin. Research and science showed that this was meant for growth and removal of parasites

(or nasties, as his  _ favourite _ female, Parkinson, would squeal). When a snake grew, their skin did not grow with them; it became a shell, supposedly there for protection, yet also unyielding and restricting. There would always come a point where further growth and maturing was not possible. This was when a snake shed its skin; it created essentially a carbon copy of its existing outer layer. Nothing more, nothing less. Even if the snake changed within the skin, its outward appearance was still the same. It was an uncomfortable process. It took him many years to realise that that was what he had been doing his entire life. His exterior remained exactly the same all those years, even if it was suffocating him.

He shouldn’t have been so steadfast on being a snake.

She was a lion. So righteous, so brave. She was someone who unconsciously demanded everyone else’s attention. Where he was synonymous with a snake, there were differences between her and her animal. She had that sort of presence that made everyone look at her,  _ notice _ her. Why? Not because she was intimidating - she was, but not in the same way - like the lion, but because she was just so regal, so pure.

He supposed that he noticed her because of her morality and her  _ goodness _ , not because of what he always told her. He recalled everything he said to her. His jaw clenched as he played the regret of his harsh taunts. He knew it was wrong to call her those derogatory names, and yet he couldn’t seem to stop. Did he act that way because he was the snake, or because the snake was him? He didn’t think he would ever know. 

So he played the piano instead, encapsulating in the plentiful slurs and meandering melodies things he was very good at expressing, for they were him, the snake. He liked to use the sustaining pedal to help. After all, it made it so much easier for notes to merge into the next, until the music felt like a blanket of sound.

But always, even the pedal could not dull the clarity of new motifs. They always started off small and almost unnoticeable, when he created variations of the ideas he was hashing out on the keys. Before he knew it, the music would go towards a new direction, now with grand chords lacking the pedal to smother them. There was nothing he could do to stop the change in emotion in the music, just as he did not notice how she established herself in his life and grew into a character so all-consuming he could do nothing but cherish with open arms. Then of course, his father brought him out of his utopia back into the harsh reality of his life. How? By encasing her body in a cloak of green.

He had never had qualms about using Unforgivables before, but once he saw her body lying mangled on the hard ground he knew he could never utter one of those curses again, except on his father. Her eyes - once shimmering with pure energy and light, now devoid of lustre - was the proverbial icing on the cake.

And so he played this too. As he neared the top of the scale, he lingered on the seventh note.

 

He recounted the first time he saw her, going up to sit on the rickety stool which would pave the rest of their adolescent years, which would determine their place with other people in the school, in the world. It was where a battered brown hat was responsible for segregation and stereotypes, concepts that many in the past had attempted to abolish. Yet every year, it told impressionable children that yes, separation and consequent discrimination was acceptable. In fact, it almost seemed as if it was encouraged, in an implicitly twisted way. It sorted him in Slytherin, and her in Gryffindor.

She was red. She was the embodiment of energy, strength, courage, passion. Red was intense. Red was blood, and blood was red. (He would learn of its importance later. But at eleven, all he needed to know was red is better than brown, and pure is better than mud.)

She was also gold. Not yellow, not brown. She was better than those mediocre colours. Gold was compassion, light, wisdom. She was gold, and therefore she was magic.

On the other hand, he was green. He was the embodiment of ambition, growth, money. Green was powerful.

He was also silver. Not grey, not white. He was, perhaps, platinum. Silver was sleekness, wealth, sophistication, elegance. He was silver, therefore he was grace. But silver was also second to gold. Just as he was always second to her.

And boy, was he constantly reminded of that. The man who brought him into the world to be superior to others seemed to love making him feel inferior. Whether in passive-aggressive conversations with notable figures at wizarding events, or in front of the Dark Lord with his wand pointing at his son after enunciating the Cruciatus curse, his father - if Lucius even deserved that title - never failed to remind him that he was never good enough.

Perhaps that was why he always left his phrases hanging. He slowed down the tempo, until the penultimate chord sounded in the room as if it was meant to be the end of a torturous piece. The piece would never find its resolution, just as he never would. He would never get more time with her, even if he wanted. Their story would end here in a state of uncertainty. Just like the piece he was playing; for music tells a story, and this story was just one of those that wasn’t meant to be finished.


End file.
